You are on a flight from Addis Ababa to Tokyo. Awake in the bright sunny sky. You lie on your seat. Looking up at the top right corner (#TTRC) of your (own?) head. Frowning.

#TTRC (The Top Right Corner)--- SynTalk Album

SynTalk thinks about the concept and process of ‘knowing’ and tries to understand ‘how we know what we know’. What is common knowledge (lokavidya), and is it largely phenomenologically acquired? If science is born out of common knowledge, then how do counterintuitive concepts come to be known? The concepts are​ derived​ off / from Kant, Marx, Pramatha Nath Bose, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Poincare, Zilsel, Conan Doyle, Popper, Polanyi, D’Ambrosio, McLuhan, Gettier, Febvre, Needham, Ellul, Monge, Vance Packard, Chomsky, Said, and Kancha Ilaiah, among others. How do we really know today that the sun is in the centre of the solar system, & links with Sherlock Holmes, realism, & positivism. How keeping earth in the centre became mathematically unwieldy. What is knowledge, reason, belief, and Justified True Belief (JTB)? How did hierarchy set in between (say) pottery and weaving? Is cognitive differentiation produced via social differentiation of labour? What is the impact of loss of agriculture as a form of life? Does / how artisanal knowledge lead to abstract knowledge, and what is the interplay between theory and praxis? How does media decide what is worth knowing (agenda setting), and is the internet selfish with a will of its own? How technologies produce skepticism. Does something exist if it is not on internet and big databases (why grant patent for neem)? What is ‘generalized calculus of all curves’ a product of, and is mathematics also embedded within social norms? The new modes of production of knowledge. Does more information on candidates change voter behaviour? Will knowing remain ‘centered’? Will all knowledge become some kind of folk epistemology (with limited ethnocentrism?)? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Amit Basole (economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston), Prof. Dhruv Raina (history & philosophy of science, JNU, Delhi), & Dr. N. Bhaskara Rao (social sciences, media studies, Center for Media Studies, Delhi)

#TWOK (The Ways Of Knowing) --- SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about the disenchantment of the world, & wonders if it is possible for there to be multiple metaphysics for the connection between human beings and nature. Is there always something in excess of what we know & experience? We discuss disenchantment and re-enchantment via contexts of boredom, capitalism, death, art, lullabies, adivasis, rag-picking, '​tuning of a tanpura​'​, pilgrimages, sparrows, ‘a tree growing’​, & more​. The concepts are derived off / from Kant, Marx, Weber, Adorno, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Dagar Brothers, & Bhimsen Joshi, among others. Is disenchantment necessarily morally pessimistic? ​How has the desire to create one's own reality and the 'cult of certainty' impacted the possibility of multiple realities & (sometimes) ‘non-epistemic’ routes? Is the disenchanted route almost always a ‘personal’ choice or is it an unequal battle? Is boredom a result of thinking about life in ‘just’ one way? Is one man’s enchantment another man’s bicycle? How disenchantment is an outcome (potentially) of the ascendancy of theory over observation? Is the process of re-enchantment also often compatible with the logic of capitalism, and how it is possible to live a partly liminal life? Can art still say something that truly surprises us? Is it even possible to interrogate the dominant logic of describing the world? Can an enchanted world be substituted, bought, or bracketed by something else? Is the digital world a source of enchantment? Why are we afraid of getting bored? How a ‘2-person system’ is the basic instrument for re-enchantment. Is it possible to imagine a world where every logic is not subservient to the logic of the economy? Is it possible to think of a life which is neither controlled by the State nor entirely vanquished by death? Do we have to take our death less seriously? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Bishnu Mohapatra (social theory, poetry, Azim Premji University, Bangalore), & Prof. Milind Sohoni (computer science, technology & development, IITB, Mumbai).

#TREM (The (Re)Enchantment Machine) --- SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about the phenomenology of getting an idea, and wonders about the fine ‘thinness’ of an idea’s form. We discuss lively, apt, inapt, frustrated, injurious, abstract, failed, & wrong ideas, and understand how an idea can sometimes (but only rarely) run away with reality. The concepts are derived off / from Plato, Guru Nanak, Kabir, Leibniz, Hume, William Blake, Peirce, Dalton, Mendeleev, Allama Iqbal, Tartakower, & Kasparov, among others. Are ideas always driven by a sense of necessity, and how necessity fundamentally deals with form (& not content)? Is the world of the sensible (matter) and the sensitive (mind) different from the (autonomous) world of ideas? Is the material world a corruption, then, of the realm of ideas? In what sense is the idea of (say) justice or table-ness enworlded? The modes of recollection, doubt, introspection, induction, deduction, or abduction. Why a solution or an idea sometimes hits one as a bolt out of the blue? Are problems also ideas? Why an epiphany can (& should) never last long? Does every idea start with an anxiety, and what is the (creative &) schizophrenic journey into the field of uncertainty? What is the granularity at which the mind operates? How blunders and combinations are all waiting to happen. Are bad ideas as rare as good ideas? What is the margin of lost memories (between remembrance and forgetfulness)? The interpretive act of rendering a poetry using melody. Can we formalize introspective rationality? Chess chunks and how expert level games are driven by pattern & experience recognition? What is the darkness of the infinite like, where one may be without an idea? The links between rabab, homeless king, Dervish dance, smothered checkmate, stylization, alaap, dreams, indrajaal, & fMRI. How the greatest empowerment (in any field) via any idea is being or momentarily becoming as large as the universe. How the likely long term change in the global political order might change the idea of an idea into one more experiential and less propositional. Does idea need to be liberated from underneath language? Is it fair to anticipate that much of human affairs in the future is going to driven by the new form of the ‘point’? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Madan Gopal Singh (sufi music, Delhi), Prof. Navjyoti Singh (philosophy, IIIT, Hyderabad), & Pravin Thipsay (chess, Mumbai).

#TFOI (The Firstness Of Ideas) --- SynTalk

Is 2+2 inevitably 4? Is it grue? Is it true? Is it true that facts do not live on their own? What is The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages? How logic chases truth up the tree of grammar? Is truth the same across languages? If we used different languages would the facts be different? What comes first: truth or meaning? Is every sentence true or false? Does truth always have the IF-THEN structure? What can computers not prove, & why? What the nature of logic and probabilities does to the notion of truth, & how there need not be one logic? Can there be heuristics of ‘interestingness’ when forward chaining for a proof? Might all mathematics be done by proof checkers and Automated Theorem Provers (ATPs)? What is a candidate for a conjecture? Why is logical contradiction the ultimate no-no? Why is stock market news more difficult to write than Shakespeare, for a ‘Bayesian-monkey’? ‘Tell me what you are interested in, and I will tell you what the truth consists in’. Do (?) counterfactuals change the world by a very small amount of information? Or, does nature provide the regularities, and we provide the causal theories? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Prof. Simon Blackburn, ex-University of Cambridge, Cambridge), computer science (Prof. Paritosh K. Pandya, TIFR, Mumbai), and mathematics (Prof. Rajat Tandon, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Listen in....


#TSOT (The Structure Of Truth) --- SynTalk

What do you believe ‘in’? Do you hold irrational beliefs? Why is it difficult to revise beliefs? Can it be beneficial to have false beliefs? Do you (objectively) believe that there is Heaven? Can beliefs be like axioms, or are they all (iteratively) based on facts? Are absurd beliefs particularly beneficial in forming a community? Does belief always imply an affect? Do you believe that voting is a foolish thing to do? Is belief an instrument of power? Can one infer beliefs of animals or children? Why is there suspension of disbelief or testing (of the truth criterion) in cinema or theatre? How are ritual spaces different? Does cinema tap into the collective (un)conscious (belief)? Is it profitable to believe that God exists? Will there be belief as long as there are skeptics? Can beliefs become redundant? Is the problem of deciding what a new belief should be NP-complete? How do we automatically change our (practical?) beliefs all the time, when it is technically extremely difficult? Would there be a pristine (messianic?) theory of belief revision in the future? How could belief revision be: a variation, a change, a decision, a monstration, or an event? Would you look through Galileo’s telescope? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from performance theory and philosophy (Dr. Soumyabrata Choudhury, JNU, New Delhi) & logic, philosophy and computer science (Prof. Rohit Parikh, CUNY, New York). Listen in....

#TDWB (The Difficulty With Believing) --- SynTalk

f(q) = Is soil a definitive sign of life? (#TCAFG)

SynTalk is a freewheeling interdisciplinary talk show with a philosophical approach to understanding the world from a long term perspective.